College Sports
Kirk Herbstreit: Play-in games may be right fix for College Football Playoff
Yahoo Sports’ Jason Fitz spoke with the ESPN college football analyst about the suggestion from Missouri head coach Eli Drinkwitz that creating play-in games for automatic bids to the playoff may be the right solution moving forward.
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Video Transcript
So I’m not sure in the short term how to get the Big Ten and the SEC to play nice in the sandbox together.
Maybe they don’t have to, but you’ve seen all of the playoff proposals.
What do you think of what the Big Ten wants to do now with automatic qualifiers for their conference?
I like, I like what Eli Drinkwitz came out and said against his own conference and, saying that why don’t we have more play and opportunities.
You know, can you imagine instead of that last Saturday this season being just the SEC or Big 10 or Big 12 or ACC championship.
Imagine if the SEC had 1 and 2, but then you also have 3 and 6 and 4 and 5 playing each other.
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And imagine if we had the excitement of 3 and 6, winner of that game is in the playoff.
4 and 5, the winner of that game is in the playoff.
I think that is fascinating, and he was very passionate in the way he described that.
I would be a fan of that personally.
And give these teams hope, as opposed to, you know, just the two teams that play in the conference championship have a shot to get that automatic spot, and then you’re hoping for at large after that.
I love the idea of a kind of a play-in weekend, throughout the entire country.
I think that would create a ton of buzz for the players, and for the fans.
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It’s fun debate, it’s subjective, it creates a lot of passion.
But I think it really, if you go back to the play-in model that I’m suggesting, it takes away some of the pressure of just a committee selecting these teams, and it gives the actual players a chance to set on the field by giving them that if they qualify, a play-in game, and then you have no one to blame.
Hey, you were in, you had the play-in game, you lost, so you have no one to blame.
You can’t blame the committee.
You know, you lost a football game, so you’re not going.
So I think that would be the right way to go personally.